Featuring articles by Dr. Shalit as well as updates, news and reviews about his many publications.

Friday, October 13, 2017

Netanyahu the Hasmonean

Joshua Sobol, the outstanding Israeli playwright and director, writes the following, after Benjamin Netanyahu's comment in a Bible class that he hopes Israel will last longer than the rule of the Hasmoneans:"Bibi compares the
life expectancy of the State of Israel with that of the Hasmoneans, which
lasted a merely 77 years, while he wishes Israel to be able to celebrate its hundredth
birthday.

In other words: let’s
hope Israel will continue to exist another thirty years.

Those words by the
Prime Minister of Israel uncannily recall the prophecy by Ali Khamenei, who
gave Israel another merely twenty-five years until it will be destroyed in war
and disappear from the map.

“After us the
deluge,” said Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Louis adopted her nihilistic
statement, who after France’s defeat in the battle of Rossbach in 1757, reformulated
it thus: “After me, the deluge.”

This is the spirit
that now emanates from “Israel’s Royal House.” The message to the young is: Go
search for a place where life expectancy is more than thirty years. And for
those who remain in this place, and desire to raise their children, grandchildren
and their great-grandchildren, the message is: Our Louis XV and Madame
Pompadour have to be speedily replaced by those that ensure Israel’s existence
over the generations, by its peaceful regional integration, rather than being
sentenced to disappear within three decades of continuous conflicts and wars.

Who wants to live
under rulers who say, “After us, the deluge”?"

It should be added that the fall of the Hasmoneans was mainly due to strife and infighting, rather than the external onslaught (which Netanyahu refers to). And Bibi, seemingly to defend his rule against the investigations carried out against him, has increased his attacks on big parts of the population, against the media and the State's democratic institutions, such as the legal system and the police.

The following is an excerpt from my novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, referring to the defeatist view reflected by Netanyahu - which I personally do not share. I trust Israel's past, present and future capability to fight against external forces that aim at its destruction. Leaders like Netanyahu, who with hate speeches set the torches of extremism on fire, do have the capability of tearing up the social fabric.

...

True, not everyone had left. There
were those who remained behind – he thought of the many poor who had no means
to get away, and the baalei teshuvah, those Masters of Repentance who
had returned to the fold of the orthodox fathers. It seemed to Eli Shimeoni
that their return to the straight path of God had given them the freedom not to
ask any questions. They always knew the answer so well, claiming that “in the
War of the End of Days, the War of Gog and Magog, total defeat would precede
the ultimate victory over evil,” as they knew to repeat by heart.

He had been fascinated by the fanatic
obsession with the graves of holy men, whether those scattered over the
country, prominently Shimon Bar Yochai at Meron, or those orgiastic journeys by
the Bratslav Hassidim to visit the grave of Rabbi Nahman in Uman, or Uriah the
Hittite in Iraq – what a thrill! Himself from a somewhat religious background,
he often wondered about the fundamentalist need of doomsday fantasies, their
need to split the world in good and evil, a “pure” world in which the
“impurity” of the “evil other” will be persecuted and exterminated, without the
simple realization that this means that if I succeed in my crusade, I will
remain trapped as the evil exterminator.

…

First his children had left, gone
abroad to study. One had taken up a prominent position at the University of
Stamville, while the other was doing gender research at the Institute of
Harback. Then his wife had followed, accusing him of being a fanatic and an archaic
idealist, or derogatively calling him silly and stubborn, an obsolete Zionist.
Friends and colleagues had discreetly taken farewell. Initially they would
apologetically say, “if things ever change, you can be sure I will be the first
one to return home. After all, there is nothing like Israel, and you can not
really extract Israel from an Israeli.” But then, people became increasingly
forceful and determined as they said goodbye. The cultured ones would say with
bleeding hearts, “this is not the country we prayed for,” and the
self-proclaimed prophets would plainly tell him, “everything is collapsing,
there is no future here.” Some would reinforce their doomsday prediction,
relying on historical evidence that an independent Jewish nation could not
survive more than a hundred years.

But what struck him the most was,
that everything was so everyday-like. Nothing special, nothing particular to
notice. So similar to Elie Wiesel’s pastoral description, “I left my native
town in the spring of 1944. It was a beautiful day. The surrounding mountains,
in their verdure, seemed taller than usual. Our neighbors were out strolling in
their shirt-sleeves. Some turned their heads away, others sneered.”

That’s all. Nothing unusual. Only the
mountains were taller than usual. And yet, when as a young man Eli had read
those few lines, which he had memorized ever since, the impact on him had been
shocking. In lieu of immanent mass murder, there was an uncanny sense of the
ordinary, sensed by the mountains that were moved more than people were. As man
became smaller, the mountains became taller. The uninvolved, the willing or
unwilling bystander, may, or may not, have struggled to wrestle himself out of
the conflict that the disruption of the ordinary entailed. The victim, on the
other hand, would already have been transported away from the reality of a
beautiful day in spring, however, not yet fully trampled down by the boots of
the octopus.

...

“From the first pages of this book,
the tone of a masterpiece emerges powerfully.

This book makes us realize that the “Israel
problem” cannot be understood in a journalistic frame of mind. Politics, war,
land, culture, and contemporary experience are expressions of the deep core of
human life, the core of the human soul.

This is an important book for anyone
who thinks about “cultural identity” and the love of one’s own country and
culture.”

Junko Chodos

Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

is available, in English as well as in Hebrew, at Amazon and other booksellers

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Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Ra’anana, Israel. He is a training and supervising analyst, and past president of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology (ISAP). He is the author of several publications, including The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel and The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego. Articles of his have have appeared inQuadrant, The Jung Journal, Spring Journal, PoliticalPsychology, ClinicalSupervisor, RoundTableReview, Jung Page, Midstream, and he has entries in The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Dr. Shalit lectures at professional institutes, universities and cultural forums in Israel, Europe and the United States.